About being 20-something and reading books

Without being controversial, I was browsing the Linkedin news (loosing my time?) and came through an article about 'being around 20 years old and reading 5 books'. And, sorry, I can't leave it, I need to express my disagreement on those kind of advices (apologies to the author of the post).

1. Its is so striking to mention 5 books and being around the twenties...but, oh, yes, I know. Reading is not hype anymore, it requires attention and intellectual effort - so, don't read too much. You could be 20 years old and have an headache;

2. Five books...twenty years...Hell, yes. That's a math. One book every two years ('cause you need to have finished your reading list before being old (that's reaching the canonical age of 30); again: one book every 24 months of your life is a real personal challenge.

3. And now comes the list itself: the top first one is Paul Coehlo's Alchemist, which is, I agree on that one, a great book. Now being the one that you should put on such a scarce resource (that being the reading as such), I'm not sure. It's a good book, with a lot of philosophical, high-level, generic life statements that can't hurt, but it's not a real game changer (you have a lot of those kind of texts available: Sun-Tzu, Confucius, Tite-Live, Buddha,...you name it);

4. ...and the four other titles are vague biographies about the Starbucks founder, the need for happiness in life etc etc.

Really amazing to conclude that you have no historic references, a very poor geographical spread of the authors (that's Brazil and UK/US) and no need to add any other linguistic references at all (oh, yes, true. Japanese, Arabic cultures or Europeans haven't written a lot about Starbucks, business and the moral obligation to live a happy life). But that was not explained on the Internet.

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